Filter to recover "lost" highlights

I am sometimes asked to "improve" video shot under poor circumstances or with low-end equipment. It is not uncommon to get footage with deep shadows and blown-out highlights in the same scene. A few days ago I posted about using RAW files in AE. Converting the footage to a TIF sequence and then OPENing AS RAW gives me ACR's 'recovery' slider, which can work wonders on blown-out highlights. (I think I read that it uses the channel with the most highlight-detail to generate detail in the other channels of the blown-out areas.) Since the TIF/RAW conversion is a bit cumbersome, let's try going in a different direction:

Anyone found a good plugin or workflow to handle this situation? I have tried AE's shadow/highlight and Tiffen's ultra contrast. Both of them do a pretty good job. But neither provides the improvement that I can get from the 'recovery' slider in the RAW interface window.

Anyone have a good workflow to make two copies of the footage to work on the highlights and shadows separately then merge the two layers back together?

1. photoshop extended you could import as AVI
2. build custom AE alpha mattes
3. a free plugin for FCP, "Captain's Blowout Fixer"
This plugin lets you selectively substitute one channel for another in the over exposed areas and color correct it to match.

Many thanks, Chris, for taking the time to provide a great template. It will take me a bit to understand what is going on in this project, but I am sure it will be worth every minute.

BTW your Technicolor projects have been very helpful to me. Even though I only occasionally need a technicolor look, I used the many ideas in your templates to develop several templates of my own/ These are used frequently for projects I am working on.

There are a million and one ways to blur footage but I believe you are looking for a way to reduce the edge contrast. I simply inverted an unsharp into an alpha matte. It gives you a lot of control over what are defined as edges. I also added in a edge enhancer which expands edges cartoony.

I'm pretty sure you're not sitting there waiting for my questions - but it almost seems like it.

You are correct, by 'edge-enhancement' I mean the artifact that is produced by most camcorders. Edge-enhancement can be from oversharpening, or even an edge-finding algorithm that produces an outline around objects in an image. It seems the less expensive the camera, the more edge-enhancement the manufacturer wants to add (probably to make up for the lack of any real resolution.) We have been using a combination of find edges and compound blur to reduce the artifacts in footage from older/inexpensive camcorders.

Once again, Chris, you've given me another way to think about solving the problem. Depending on the source material your solution seems to work better (quite a bit better in some cases.)

Seems to also have the added bonus of reducing some of the noise and/or compression artifacts.

The addition of the "tolerance" sliders, and the "draft mode" was a great idea. Methinks you may have a marketable product here! Then again, maybe I'm the only one trying to improve video that was shot in the stone-age.

have you ever wished that it was easy to fix your blown out footage with missing highlights and/or dark shadows were fixed with a single click. Now they are. You can even tweak your footage to look like HDR in a few seconds even if you don't own 2 cameras and a beam splitter.

When I first started using AE to improve consumer-grade footage, I took it as a personal challenge to see "how much better can I make this."

I've learned some tricks over the last few years and developed a few techniques of my own. I tell folks that I can never make your footage look like it was shot with a high-end camera on a well-lit set, but I can make it look better - sometimes a LOT better.

The latest incarnation of your highlight recovery project is simply amazing. I haven't done an A-B comparison, but it does look like you have exceeded the recovery capabilities of RAW. It will take me a while to work my way through your project to see what is going on in there.

Chris, I'm trying to use your template to remove some unfortunate glare off a bald head. I've replaced the .jpg in your project with my video file and then resized all the compositions in the project to match that video file. However, I'm not seeing any changes in the "final" composition, but I am seeing an expression error in the "unsharp precomp" composition which reads:

"layer named 'Local Contrast Inhibitor' is missing or does not exist. It may have been renamed, moved..." etc.

I haven't renamed, moved, deleted any layers in the template. Do you have any suggestions for fixing this expression?